CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iospropertieslocalizationinternationalizationplist
user1516264
user1516264

Reputation: 71

How to localize a plist file

I appreciate your help in advance. I have searched high and low for an answer with no luck.

I have an app that uses very specialized sports terms which I store in a plist file. Those terms are then displayed in a UITableView. When the user taps on the skill, a video demo is played. The app works great, but I would very much like to localize it for other languages.

I have gotten the terms translated, and I was hoping I could localize the plist file by making a copy of it and just changing the sport-specific terms in each successive copy of the file, and then put it in its respective language folder. Is this possible and if so, can someone please point me to a good example or tutorial?

So far, I have I have tried to localize the plist file for Russian in Xcode and put it in its own ru.lproj folder, however, then when I run it in the simulator no data appears at all in the UITableView! Without the Russian file, it works fine. So my thought is that somehow Xcode is confusing the plist file because the name is the same, even though it is in a different directory (en.lproj and ru.lproj). The file is called Basic.plist in both directories. This process is totally confusing to me, and from what I gather it shouldn't be that difficult to figure out!

Again, thank you in advance. The localization concept is completely new to me and I am eager to learn it. I am quite sure I understand how the .strings files work with strings that are embedded in code, but I would like to know if it is possible to translate an entire pList file.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 3052

Answers (1)

Clafou
Clafou

Reputation: 15400

A lot of things could be wrong. One possibility is that the plist files don't get copied into the bundle (verify in your target's Build Phases page--it should say Basic.plist with "...in (localization).lproj" written next to it.

If you have manually created the ru.lproj, maybe you copied it in the wrong place, or left the original file in the wrong place (it should now be inside en.lproj). Rather than manually create the file, it's easiest to select the file Basic.plist in XCode and use the Localization control inside File Inspector to add localizations. As Kevin Grant mentions, if this doesn't show your file as having English and Russian, then something is wrong, and you could start again using the + control.

Finally, I'm not 100% sure about this but close enough: I believe your code probably needs to be updated to figure out where to load the plist file from. It it were a .xib or a .strings file, you wouldn't have to do this as this would be automatic and iOS knows to look inside the relevant .lproj folder first (when you load a .xib you only specify its name, not its exact location). But I assume you are loading the plist file through a specific path, therefore the path must now include the .proj folder.

If possible for you, I think a nicer approach to having different plist files per language would be to have just one plist, but instead of displaying the string from the plist you could use it as a key to your .strings file. You can retrieve the localization using the NSLocalizedString macro (which is defined as [[NSBundle mainBundle] localizedStringForKey:(key) value:@"" table:nil]) which will give you the corresponding value in the localized .strings file at run time. Of course this would mean that when you update your plist, you would also have to update your .strings files to match. The good thing is that you wouldn't need to determine the path of the plist for your active language -- with NSLocalizedString, you don't provide a path at all.

Upvotes: 1

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